Ctags integration with CEDET/semantic

Question

I have setup my Emacs(v 23.3) with CEDET 1.1 using info found in http://cedet.sourceforge.net/ and the article by Alex Ott (http://alexott.net/en/writings/emacs-devenv/EmacsCedet.html)

I've got most of the kinks worked out to my linking with respect to my init.el file.

Now for the problem. I build TAGS myself, so there is a TAGS file in the root of my project. However semantic doesn't seem to want to use that file and barfs with the following errors:

Source file `/users/lshvarts/.emacs.d/cedet-1.1/semantic/ctags/semantic-ectag-util.el' newer than byte-compiled file
Exuberent CTags not found. Found ctags that comes with Emacs
semantic-ectag-test-version: Exuberent CTags not found. Use M-x semantic-ectag-version RET
Exuberent CTags not found. Use M-x semantic-ectag-version RET
Exuberent CTags not found. Found ctags that comes with Emacs


Etags that I have might not be the newest version, but I am puzzled why it plainly refuses to work with it.
boxy:92> etags --version
etags (GNU Emacs 20.7)
Copyright (C) 1996 Free Software Foundation, Inc. and Ken Arnold
This program is distributed under the same terms as Emacs
boxy:93>


Any help/insight is appreciated.

Answer 1

you need not the etags, but Exuberent CTags! You can install it from your linux/mac repository (usually it has name ectags, or exuberant-ctags on Debian), or from it's site.

Answer 2

This is not exactly related to the problem you had, but I got the same error (Exuberent CTags not found. Use M-x semantic-ectag-version RET) after upgrading to ubuntu 12.04.

The problem was that ctags-exuberant --version returned a non numerical version:

Exuberant Ctags 5.9~svn20110310, Copyright (C) 1996-2009 Darren Hiebert
  Compiled: Nov  9 2011, 17:40:39
  Addresses: <dhiebert@users.sourceforge.net>, http://ctags.sourceforge.net
  Optional compiled features: +wildcards, +regex

Just replace regex

"Exuberant Ctags \\([0-9.]+\\),"

by

"Exuberant Ctags \\([0-9.]+\\)[~,]"

in semantic-ectag-version (in semantic-ectag-util.el) and recompile the file.